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I thought it was beauty alone that gave significance to life.

If you let me live, I will buy you beer whenever I see you in town.

No parent has yet been born who can save a child from childhood.

Strange then, strange now, that language wants to be alone with me.

Men like me and my brothers filmed what we planted for proof we existed.

Her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

Little footage, this plot, where it thrived at first, then ghosted away.

To deny love can’t undo the feeling of it.

When the snake attacked the soldier, its fangs left a violent opening.

When I think on it, I can’t believe I’m going to kill two people over weed.

We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts. This we know.

One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.

We’d hit something in the dark which—bang!—was there and gone.

In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.

My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.

The time a man kissed my hand when we met. Though he’s been dead for decades now, I still feel the kiss.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

You retell the story and I wait for my cues, when to smile, nod.

Love speaks in silence, on behalf of lovers too tired for words.

I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.

Like every thing made, the photograph intimates a view.

But too much rain can translate anything to unspeakable.

With a hammer well aimed, try to destroy the whole with a single blow.